Australian $1 Coins

1998 Howard Florey

The 1998 $1 Coin has captured our admiration for the tenacity of Howard Florey and his research
team in their efforts to make antibiotics available.
Australian pathologist and co-discoverer of penicillin. Born in Adelaide, Australia, and educated
in medicine at the University of Adelaide, he later studied and taught in England. In 1935 he was
appointed director of the Dunn School of Pathology, University of Oxford. Florey studied naturally
occurring antibacterials, of which the Penicillium mold discovered by Sir Alexander Fleming seemed
the most promising. In 1939 Florey and the German-British biochemist Ernst Boris Chain isolated the
active agent, penicillin, from a fraction of the mold and formulated procedures for extraction and
production. With British industries affected by World War II, Florey took his process to the United
States, where private and government laboratories produced sufficient quantities to combat
bacterial infection in wounded soldiers. For his work he was knighted in 1944, shared the Nobel
Prize in physiology or medicine in 1945 with Chain and Fleming, was elected president of the Royal
Society in 1960, and was created a life peer in 1965.

This coin was designed by Horst Hahne, with a mintmark next to the design of Dr Howard
Florey.